Perugia Balcony comes from The Greenwood Poet, a book that came out last week as part of my ongoing romance with doubling my years on odd years and then writing that many poems.

I spent a couple of years, off and on, writing about the gothic fantastic and the environment and death, before and after COVID (thought that obviously wasn’t the original intent). I’m going to serialize them on the site for subscribers. If you subscribe for three months, you’ll get this for free. And besides, subscribing is free for the first seven days, so why not try out the Showbear archive?

Of course — 20% will be free for everyone and I encourage you to pick up a copy of the hardback.

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Perugia Balcony

For salt they split and warred how we for tea
And postage taxes killed our families.
For long enough their fratricide endured 
Until they hired the Swiss to fight the Swiss. 

The slates of clay will break and fly amiss 
And shoot as sleds of dogs on frozen, pure, 
Albedo snow — the moss on slate and stone
Invokes Miss Nature over marble, brick,
And patches piercing into layered slacks 
Of towers’s legs like armor, sculpture, bones.

Sashiko stitches bind my bride’s release:

What predicates our patchwork wars but peace?

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Photo by Achim Ruhnau on Unsplash